1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a digital pictorial book system, a pictorial book searching method, and a machine readable medium storing thereon a pictorial book searching program. More particularly, the present invention relates to a digital pictorial book system, a pictorial book searching method, and a machine readable medium storing thereon a pictorial book searching program for searching for and providing a user with an explanation of an object of which an image is captured.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, a digital pictorial book system is known which extracts a feature of an object from an image of the object captured by using a digital camera, searches for and provides a user with information on the object in an image database on the basis of the extracted feature (for example, see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 1998-254901).
According to the conventional digital pictorial book system, for example, a candidate of a name of the object is searched out in an image database by comparing a digitized image of the object with a digitized image of each category stored in the image database.
In case the captured image is compared with the image stored in the image database, the search result is largely dependent on the difference in the image capturing condition. Therefore, the conventional digital pictorial book system tries to provide a user with convenience by making it easy to get the search result by increasing ambiguity of comparison. In this case, however, there is not known an efficient method for narrowing down the candidates when various candidates are searched out according to the conventional digital pictorial book system.